Jung's theory divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the
ego,which
Jung identifies with the conscious mind. Closely related is the personal
unconscious, which includes anything which is not presently conscious,
but can be. The personal unconscious is like most people's understanding
of the unconscious in that it includes both memories that are easily brought
to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason. But it does
not include the instincts that Freud would have it include.

But then Jung adds the part of the psyche that makes his theory stand
out from all others: the collective unconscious. You could call
it your "psychic inheritance." It is the reservoir of our experiences as
a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never
be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors,
most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly,
by looking at those influences.

There are some experiences that show the effects of the collective unconscious
more clearly than others: The experiences of love at first sight, of deja
vu (the feeling that you've been here before), and the immediate recognition
of certain symbols and the meanings of certain myths, could all be understood
as the sudden conjunction of our outer reality and the inner reality of
the collective unconscious. Grander examples are the creative experiences
shared by artists and musicians all over the world and in all times, or
the spiritual experiences of mystics of all religions, or the parallels
in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, and literature.

A nice example that has been greatly discussed recently is the near-death
experience. It seems that many people, of many different cultural backgrounds,
find that they have very similar recollections when they are brought back
from a close encounter with death. They speak of leaving their bodies,
seeing their bodies and the events surrounding them clearly, of being pulled
through a long tunnel towards a bright light, of seeing deceased relatives
or religious figures waiting for them, and of their disappointment at having
to leave this happy scene to return to their bodies. Perhaps we are all
"built" to experience death in this fashion.

Archetypes

The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes.
Jung also called them dominants, imagos, mythological or primordial images,
and a few other names, but archetypes seems to have won out over these.
An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain
way.

The archetype has no form of its own, but it acts as an "organizing
principle" on the things we see or do. It works the way that instincts
work in Freud's theory: At first, the baby just wants something to eat,
without knowing what it wants. It has a rather indefinite yearning which,
nevertheless, can be satisfied by some things and not by others. Later,
with experience, the child begins to yearn for something more specific
when it is hungry -- a bottle, a cookie, a broiled lobster, a slice of
New York style pizza.

The archetype is like a black hole in space: You only know its there
by how it draws matter and light to itself.

The mother archetype

The mother archetype

is a particularly good example. All of our
ancestors had mothers. We have evolved in an environment that included
a mother or mother-substitute. We would never have survived without our
connection with a nurturing-one during our times as helpless infants. It
stands to reason that we are "built" in a way that reflects that evolutionary
environment: We come into this world ready to want mother, to seek her,
to recognize her, to deal with her.

So the mother archetype is our built-in ability to recognize a certain
relationship, that of "mothering." Jung says that this is rather abstract,
and we are likely to project the archetype out into the world and onto
a particular person, usually our own mothers. Even when an archetype doesn't
have a particular real person available, we tend to personify the archetype,
that is, turn it into a mythological "story-book" character. This character
symbolizes the archetype.

The mother archetype is symbolized by the primordial mother or "earth
mother" of mythology, by Eve and Mary in western traditions, and by less
personal symbols such as the church, the nation, a forest, or the ocean.
According to Jung, someone whose own mother failed to satisfy the demands
of the archetype may well be one that spends his or her life seeking comfort
in the church, or in identification with "the motherland," or in meditating
upon the figure of Mary, or in a life at sea.

Mana

You must understand that these archetypes are not really biological
things, like Freud's instincts. They are more spiritual demands. For example,
if you dreamt about long things, Freud might suggest these things represent
the phallus and ultimately sex. But Jung might have a very different interpretation.
Even dreaming quite specifically about a penis might not have much to do
with some unfulfilled need for sex.

It is curious that in primitive societies, phallic symbols do not usually
refer to sex at all. They usually symbolize mana, or spiritual power.
These symbols would be displayed on occasions when the spirits are being
called upon to increase the yield of corn, or fish, or to heal someone.
The connection between the penis and strength, between semen and seed,
between fertilization and fertility are understood by most cultures.

The shadow

Sex and the life instincts in general are, of course, represented somewhere
in Jung's system. They are a part of an archetype called the shadow.
It derives from our prehuman, animal past, when our concerns were limited
to survival and reproduction, and when we weren't self-conscious.

It is the "dark side" of the ego, and the evil that we are capable of
is often stored there. Actually, the shadow is amoral -- neither good nor
bad, just like animals. An animal is capable of tender care for its young
and vicious killing for food, but it doesn't choose to do either. It just
does what it does. It is "innocent." But from our human perspective, the
animal world looks rather brutal, inhuman, so the shadow becomes something
of a garbage can for the parts of ourselves that we can't quite admit to.

Symbols of the shadow include the snake (as in the garden of Eden),
the dragon, monsters, and demons. It often guards the entrance to a cave
or a pool of water, which is the collective unconscious. Next time you
dream about wrestling with the devil, it may only be yourself you are wrestling
with!

The persona

The persona represents your public image. The word is, obviously,
related to the word person and personality, and comes from a Latin word
for mask. So the persona is the mask you put on before you show yourself
to the outside world. Although it begins as an archetype, by the time we
are finished realizing it, it is the part of us most distant from the collective
unconscious.

At its best, it is just the "good impression" we all wish to present
as we fill the roles society requires of us. But, of course, it can also
be the "false impression" we use to manipulate people's opinions and behaviors.
And, at its worst, it can be mistaken, even by ourselves, for our true
nature: Sometimes we believe we really are what we pretend to be!

Anima and animus

A part of our persona is the role of male or female we must play. For
most people that role is determined by their physical gender. But Jung,
like Freud and Adler and others, felt that we are all really bisexual in
nature. When we begin our lives as fetuses, we have undifferentiated sex
organs that only gradually, under the influence of hormones, become male
or female. Likewise, when we begin our social lives as infants, we are
neither male nor female in the social sense. Almost immediately -- as soon
as those pink or blue booties go on -- we come under the influence of society,
which gradually molds us into men and women.

In all societies, the expectations placed on men and women differ, usually
based on our different roles in reproduction, but often involving many
details that are purely traditional. In our society today, we still have
many remnants of these traditional expectations. Women are still expected
to be more nurturant and less aggressive; men are still expected to be
strong and to ignore the emotional side of life. But Jung felt these expectations
meant that we had developed only half of our potential.

The anima is the female aspect present in the collective unconscious
of men, and the animus is the male aspect present in the collective
unconscious of women. Together, they are refered to as syzygy. The
anima may be personified as a young girl, very spontaneous and intuitive,
or as a witch, or as the earth mother. It is likely to be associated with
deep emotionality and the force of life itself. The animus may be personified
as a wise old man, a sorcerer, or often a number of males, and tends to
be logical, often rationalistic, even argumentative.

The anima or animus is the archetype through which you communicate with
the collective unconscious generally, and it is important to get into touch
with it. It is also the archetype that is responsible for much of our love
life: We are, as an ancient Greek myth suggests, always looking for our
other half, the half that the Gods took from us, in members of the opposite
sex. When we fall in love at first sight, then we have found someone that
"fills" our anima or animus archetype particularly well!

Other archetypes

Jung said that there is no fixed number of archetypes which we could
simply list and memorize. They overlap and easily melt into each other
as needed, and their logic is not the usual kind. But here are some he
mentions:

Besides mother, their are other family archetypes. Obviously, there
is father, who is often symbolized by a guide or an authority figure.
There is also the archetype family, which represents the idea of
blood relationship and ties that run deeper than those based on conscious
reasons.

There is also thechild, represented in mythology and art by
children, infants most especially, as well as other small creatures. The
Christ child celebrated at Christmas is a manifestation of the child archetype,
and represents the future, becoming, rebirth, and salvation. Curiously,
Christmas falls during the winter solstice, which in northern primitive
cultures also represents the future and rebirth. People used to light bonfires
and perform ceremonies to encourage the sun's return to them. The child
archetype often blends with other archetypes to form the child-god, or
the child-hero.

Many archetypes are story characters. The hero is one of the
main ones. He is the mana personality and the defeater of evil dragons.
Basically, he represents the ego -- we do tend to identify with the hero
of the story -- and is often engaged in fighting the shadow, in the form
of dragons and other monsters. The hero is, however, often dumb as a post.
He is, after all, ignorant of the ways of the collective unconscious. Luke
Skywalker, in the Star Wars films, is the perfect example of a hero.

The hero is often out to rescue the maiden. She represents purity,
innocence, and, in all likelihood, naivete. In the beginning of the Star
Wars story, Princess Leia is the maiden. But, as the story progresses,
she becomes the anima, discovering the powers of the force -- the collective
unconscious -- and becoming an equal partner with Luke, who turns out to
be her brother.

The hero is guided by the wise old man. He is a form of the animus,
and reveals to the hero the nature of the collective unconscious. In Star
Wars, he is played by Obi Wan Kenobi and, later, Yoda. Notice that
they teach Luke about the force and, as Luke matures, they die and become
a part of him.

You might be curious as to the archetype represented by Darth Vader,
the "dark father." He is the shadow and the master of the dark side of
the force. He also turns out to be Luke and Leia's father. When he dies,
he becomes one of the wise old men.

There is also an animal archetype, representing humanity's relationships
with the animal world. The hero's faithful horse would be an example. Snakes
are often symbolic of the animal archetype, and are thought to be particularly
wise. Animals, after all, are more in touch with their natures than we
are. Perhaps loyal little robots and reliable old spaceships -- the Falcon--
are also symbols of animal.

And there is the trickster, often represented by a clown or a
magician. The trickster's role is to hamper the hero's progress and to
generally make trouble. In Norse mythology, many of the gods' adventures
originate in some trick or another played on their majesties by the half-god
Loki.

There are other archetypes that are a little more difficult to talk
about. One is the original man, represented in western religion
by Adam. Another is the God archetype, representing our need to
comprehend the universe, to give a meaning to all that happens, to see
it all as having some purpose and direction.

The hermaphrodite, both male and female, represents the union
of opposites, an important idea in Jung's theory. In some religious art,
Jesus is presented as a rather feminine man. Likewise, in China, the character
Kuan Yin began as a male saint (the bodhisattva Avalokiteshwara), but was
portrayed in such a feminine manner that he is more often thought of as
the female goddess of compassion!

The most important archetype of all is the self. The self is
the ultimate unity of the personality and is symbolized by the circle,
the cross, and the mandala figures that Jung was fond of painting.
A mandala is a drawing that is used in meditation because it tends to draw
your focus back to the center, and it can be as simple as a geometric figure
or as complicated as a stained glass window. The personifications that
best represent self are Christ and Buddha, two people who many believe
achieved perfection. But Jung felt that perfection of the personality is
only truly achieved in death.

The dynamics of the psyche

So much for the content of the psyche. Now let's turn to the principles
of its operation. Jung gives us three principles, beginning with the
principle of opposites. Every wish immediately suggests its opposite.
If I have a good thought, for example, I cannot help but have in me somewhere
the opposite bad thought. In fact, it is a very basic point: In order to
have a concept of good, you must have a concept of bad, just like you can't
have up without down or black without white.

This idea came home to me when I was about eleven. I occasionally tried
to help poor innocent woodland creatures who had been hurt in some way
-- often, I'm afraid, killing them in the process. Once I tried to nurse
a baby robin back to health. But when I picked it up, I was so struck by
how light it was that the thought came to me that I could easily crush
it in my hand. Mind you, I didn't like the idea, but it was undeniably
there.

According to Jung, it is the opposition that creates the power (or libido)
of the psyche. It is like the two poles of a battery, or the splitting
of an atom. It is the contrast that gives energy, so that a strong contrast
gives strong energy, and a weak contrast gives weak energy.

The second principle is the principle of equivalence. The energy
created from the opposition is "given" to both sides equally. So, when
I held that baby bird in my hand, there was energy to go ahead and try
to help it. But there is an equal amount of energy to go ahead and crush
it. I tried to help the bird, so that energy went into the various behaviors
involved in helping it. But what happens to the other energy?

Well, that depends on your attitude towards the wish that you didn't
fulfill. If you acknowledge it, face it, keep it available to the conscious
mind, then the energy goes towards a general improvement of your psyche.
You grow, in other words.

But if you pretend that you never had that evil wish, if you deny and
suppress it, the energy will go towards the development of a complex.
A complex is a pattern of suppressed thoughts and feelings that cluster
-- constellate -- around a theme provided by some archetype. If you deny
ever having thought about crushing the little bird, you might put that
idea into the form offered by the shadow (your "dark side"). Or if a man
denies his emotional side, his emotionality might find its way into the
anima archetype. And so on.

Here's where the problem comes: If you pretend all your life that you
are only good, that you don't even have the capacity to lie and cheat and
steal and kill, then all the times when you do good, that other side of
you goes into a complex around the shadow. That complex will begin to develop
a life of its own, and it will haunt you. You might find yourself having
nightmares in which you go around stomping on little baby birds!

If it goes on long enough, the complex may take over, may "possess"
you, and you might wind up with a multiple personality. In the movie The
Three Faces of Eve, Joanne Woodward portrayed a meek, mild woman who eventually
discovered that she went out and partied like crazy on Saturday nights.
She didn't smoke, but found cigarettes in her purse, didn't drink, but
woke up with hangovers, didn't fool around, but found herself in sexy outfits.
Although multiple personality is rare, it does tend to involve these kinds
of black-and-white extremes.

The final principle is the principle of entropy. This is the
tendency for oppositions to come together, and so for energy to decrease,
over a person's lifetime. Jung borrowed the idea from physics, where entropy
refers to the tendency of all physical systems to "run down," that is,
for all energy to become evenly distributed. If you have, for example,
a heat source in one corner of the room, the whole room will eventually
be heated.

When we are young, the opposites will tend to be extreme, and so we
tend to have lots of energy. For example, adolescents tend to exaggerate
male-female differences, with boys trying hard to be macho and girls trying
equally hard to be feminine. And so their sexual activity is invested with
great amounts of energy! Plus, adolescents often swing from one extreme
to another, being wild and crazy one minute and finding religion the next.

As we get older, most of us come to be more comfortable with our different
facets. We are a bit less naively idealistic and recognize that we are
all mixtures of good and bad. We are less threatened by the opposite sex
within us and become more androgynous. Even physically, in old age, men
and women become more alike. This process of rising above our opposites,
of seeing both sides of who we are, is called transcendence.

The self

The goal of life is to realize the self. The self is an archetype
that represents the transcendence of all opposites, so that every aspect
of your personality is expressed equally. You are then neither and both
male and female, neither and both ego and shadow, neither and both good
and bad, neither and both conscious and unconscious, neither and both an
individual and the whole of creation. And yet, with no oppositions, there
is no energy, and you cease to act. Of course, you no longer need to act.

To keep it from getting too mystical, think of it as a new center, a
more balanced position, for your psyche. When you are young, you focus
on the ego and worry about the trivialities of the persona. When you are
older (assuming you have been developing as you should), you focus a little
deeper, on the self, and become closer to all people, all life, even the
universe itself. The self-realized person is actually less selfish.

Synchronicity

Personality theorists have argued for many years about whether psychological
processes function in terms of mechanism or teleology. Mechanism
is the idea that things work in through cause and effect: One thing leads
to another which leads to another, and so on, so that the past determines
the present. Teleology is the idea that we are lead on by our ideas about
a future state, by things like purposes, meanings, values, and so on. Mechanism
is linked with determinism and with the natural sciences. Teleology is
linked with free will and has become rather rare. It is still common among
moral, legal, and religious philosophers, and, of course, among personality
theorists.

Among the people discussed in this book, Freudians and behaviorists
tend to be mechanists, while the neo-Freudians, humanists, and existentialists
tend to be teleologists. Jung believes that both play a part. But he adds
a third alternative called synchronicity.

Synchronicity is the occurrence of two events that are not linked causally,
nor linked teleologically, yet are meaningfully related. Once, a client
was describing a dream involving a scarab beetle when, at that very instant,
a very similar beetle flew into the window. Often, people dream about something,
like the death of a loved one, and find the next morning that their loved
one did, in fact, die at about that time. Sometimes people pick up he phone
to call a friend, only to find that their friend is already on the line.
Most psychologists would call these things coincidences, or try to show
how they are more likely to occur than we think. Jung believed the were
indications of how we are connected, with our fellow humans and with nature
in general, through the collective unconscious.

Jung was never clear about his own religious beliefs. But this unusual
idea of synchronicity is easily explained by the Hindu view of reality.
In the Hindu view, our individual egos are like islands in a sea: We look
out at the world and each other and think we are separate entities. What
we don't see is that we are connected to each other by means of the ocean
floor beneath the waters.

The outer world is called maya, meaning illusion, and is thought
of as God's dream or God's dance. That is, God creates it, but it has no
reality of its own. Our individual egos they call jivatman, which
means individual souls. But they, too, are something of an illusion. We
are all actually extensions of the one and only Atman, or God, who
allows bits of himself to forget his identity, to become apparently separate
and independent, to become us. But we never truly are separate. When we
die, we wake up and realize who we were from the beginning: God.

When we dream or meditate, we sink into our personal unconscious, coming
closer and closer to our true selves, the collective unconscious. It is
in states like this that we are especially open to "communications" from
other egos. Synchronicity makes Jung's theory one of the rare ones that
is not only compatible with parapsychological phenomena, but actually tries
to explain them!

Introversion and extroversion

Jung developed a personality typology that has become so popular that
some people don't realize he did anything else! It begins with the distinction
between introversion and extroversion. Introverts are people
who prefer their internal world of thoughts, feelings, fantasies, dreams,
and so on, while extroverts prefer the external world of things and people
and activities.

The words have become confused with ideas like shyness and sociability,
partially because introverts tend to be shy and extroverts tend to be sociable.
But Jung intended for them to refer more to whether you ("ego") more often
faced toward the persona and outer reality, or toward the collective unconscious
and its archetypes. In that sense, the introvert is somewhat more mature
than the extrovert. Our culture, of course, values the extrovert much more.
And Jung warned that we all tend to value our own type most!

We now find the introvert-extravert dimension in several theories, notably
Hans Eysenck's, although often hidden under alternative names such as "sociability"
and "surgency."

The functions

Whether we are introverts or extroverts, we need to deal with the world,
inner and outer. And each of us has our preferred ways of dealing with
it, ways we are comfortable with and good at. Jung suggests there are four
basic ways, or functions:

The first is sensing. Sensing means what it says: getting information
by means of the senses. A sensing person is good at looking and listening
and generally getting to know the world. Jung called this one of the irrational
functions,
meaning that it involved perception rather than judging of information.

The second is thinking. Thinking means evaluating information
or ideas rationally, logically. Jung called this a rational function,
meaning that it involves decision making or judging, rather than simple
intake of information.

The third is intuiting. Intuiting is a kind of perception that
works outside of the usual conscious processes. It is irrational or perceptual,
like sensing, but comes from the complex integration of large amounts of
information, rather than simple seeing or hearing. Jung said it was like
seeing around corners.

The fourth is feeling. Feeling, like thinking, is a matter of
evaluating information, this time by weighing one's overall, emotional
response. Jung calls it rational, obviously not in the usual sense of the
word.

We all have these functions. We just have them in different proportions,
you might say. Each of us has a superior function, which we prefer
and which is best developed in us, a secondary function, which we
are aware of and use in support of our superior function, a tertiary
function,
which is only slightly less developed but not terribly conscious, and an
inferior
function,
which is poorly developed and so unconscious that we might deny its existence
in ourselves.

Most of us develop only one or two of the functions, but our goal should
be to develop all four. Once again, Jung sees the transcendence of opposites
as the ideal.

Assessment

Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers found Jung's types
and functions so revealing of people's personalities that they decided
to develop a paper-and-pencil test. It came to be called the Myers-Briggs
Type Indicator, and is one of the most popular, and most studied, tests
around.

On the basis of your answers on about 125 questions, you are placed
in one of sixteen types, with the understanding that some people might
find themselves somewhere between two or three types. What type you are
says quite a bit about you -- your likes and dislikes, your likely career
choices, your compatibility with others, and so on. People tend to like
it quite a bit. It has the unusual quality among personality tests of not
being too judgmental: None of the types is terribly negative, nor are any
overly positive. Rather than assessing how "crazy" you are, the "Myers-Briggs"
simply opens up your personality for exploration.

The test has four scales. Extroversion - Introversion (E-I) is
the most important. Test researchers have found that about 75 % of the
population is extroverted.

The next one is Sensing - Intuiting (S-N), with about 75 % of
the population sensing.

The next is Thinking - Feeling (T-F). Although these are distributed
evenly through the population, researchers have found that two-thirds of
men are thinkers, while two-thirds of women are feelers. This might seem
like stereotyping, but keep in mind that feeling and thinking are both
valued equally by Jungians, and that one-third of men are feelers and one-third
of women are thinkers. Note, though, that society does value thinking and
feeling differently, and that feeling men and thinking women often have
difficulties dealing with people's stereotyped expectations.

The last is Judging - Perceiving (J-P), not one of Jung's original
dimensions. Myers and Briggs included this one in order to help determine
which of a person's functions is superior. Generally, judging people are
more careful, perhaps inhibited, in their lives. Perceiving people tend
to be more spontaneous, sometimes careless. If you are an extrovert and
a "J," you are a thinker or feeler, whichever is stronger. Extroverted
and "P" means you are a senser or intuiter. On the other hand, an introvert
with a high "J" score will be a senser or intuiter, while an introvert
with a high "P" score will be a thinker or feeler. J and P are equally
distributed in the population.

Each type is identified by four letters, such as ENFJ. These have proven
so popular, you can even find them on people's license plates!

ENFJ (Extroverted feeling with intuiting): These people are easy
speakers. They tend to idealize their friends. They make good parents,
but have a tendency to allow themselves to be used. They make good therapists,
teachers, executives, and salespeople.

ENFP (Extroverted intuiting with feeling): These people love
novelty and surprises. They are big on emotions and expression. They are
susceptible to muscle tension and tend to be hyperalert. they tend to feel
self-conscious. They are good at sales, advertising, politics, and acting.

ENTJ (Extroverted thinking with intuiting): In charge at home,
they expect a lot from spouses and kids. They like organization and structure
and tend to make good executives and administrators.

ENTP (Extroverted intuiting with thinking): These are lively
people, not humdrum or orderly. As mates, they are a little dangerous,
especially economically. They are good at analysis and make good entrepreneurs.
They do tend to play at oneupmanship.

ESFJ (Extroverted feeling with sensing): These people like harmony.
They tend to have strong shoulds and should-nots. They may be dependent,
first on parents and later on spouses. They wear their hearts on their
sleeves and excel in service occupations involving personal contact.

ESFP (Extroverted sensing with feeling): Very generous and impulsive,
they have a low tolerance for anxiety. They make good performers, they
like public relations, and they love the phone. They should avoid scholarly
pursuits, especially science.

ESTJ (Extroverted thinking with sensing): These are responsible
mates and parents and are loyal to the workplace. They are realistic, down-to-earth,
orderly, and love tradition. They often find themselves joining civic clubs!

ESTP (Extroverted sensing with thinking): These are action-oriented
people, often sophisticated, sometimes ruthless -- our "James Bonds." As
mates, they are exciting and charming, but they have trouble with commitment.
They make good promoters, entrepreneurs, and con artists.

INFJ (Introverted intuiting with feeling): These are serious
students and workers who really want to contribute. They are private and
easily hurt. They make good spouses, but tend to be physically reserved.
People often think they are psychic. They make good therapists, general
practitioners, ministers, and so on.

INFP (Introverted feeling with intuiting): These people are idealistic,
self-sacrificing, and somewhat cool or reserved. They are very family and
home oriented, but don't relax well. You find them in psychology, architecture,
and religion, but never in business. Both Jung and I admire this type.
Of course, both Jung and I are this type!

INTJ (Introverted intuiting with thinking): These are the most
independent of all types. They love logic and ideas and are drawn to scientific
research. They can be rather single-minded, though.

INTP (Introverted thinking with intuiting): Faithful, preoccupied,
and forgetful, these are the bookworms. They tend to be very precise in
their use of language. They are good at logic and math and make good philosophers
and theoretical scientists, but not writers or salespeople.

ISFJ (Introverted sensing with feeling): These people are service
and work oriented. They may suffer from fatigue and tend to be attracted
to troublemakers. They are good nurses, teachers, secretaries, general
practitioners, librarians, middle managers, and housekeepers.

ISFP (Introverted feeling with sensing): They are shy and retiring,
are not talkative, but like sensuous action. They like painting, drawing,
sculpting, composing, dancing -- the arts generally -- and they like nature.
They are not big on commitment.

ISTJ (Introverted sensing with thinking): These are dependable
pillars of strength. They often try to reform their mates and other people.
They make good bank examiners, auditors, accountants, tax examiners, supervisors
in libraries and hospitals, business, home ec., and phys. ed. teachers,
and boy or girl scouts!

ISTP (Introverted thinking with sensing): These people are action-oriented
and fearless, and crave excitement. They are impulsive and dangerous to
stop. They often like tools, instruments, and weapons, and often become
technical experts. They are not interested in communications and are often
incorrectly diagnosed as dyslexic or hyperactive. They tend to do badly
in school.

Even without taking the test, you may very well recognize yourself in
one or two of these types. Or ask others -- they may be more accurate!
But, if you like, you can take another Jungian personality test free on
the internet: The Keirsey Temperament
Sorter. I highly recommend it!

Discussion

Quite a few people find that Jung has a great deal to say to them. They
include writers, artists, musicians, film makers, theologians, clergy of
all denominations, students of mythology, and, of course, some psychologists.
Examples that come to mind are the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the film
maker George Lucas, and the science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. Anyone
interested in creativity, spirituality, psychic phenomena, the universal,
and so on will find in Jung a kindred spirit.

But scientists, including most psychologists, have a lot of trouble
with Jung. Not only does he fully support the teleological view (as do
most personality theorists), but he goes a step further and talks about
the mystical interconnectedness of synchronicity. Not only does he postulate
an unconscious, where things are not easily available to the empirical
eye, but he postulates a collective unconscious that never has been and
never will be conscious.

In fact, Jung takes an approach that is essentially the reverse of the
mainstream's reductionism: Jung begins with the highest levels -- even
spiritualism -- and derives the lower levels of psychology and physiology
from them.

Even psychologists who applaud his teleology and antireductionist position
may not be comfortable with him. Like Freud, Jung tries to bring everything
into his system. He has little room for chance, accident, or circumstances.
Personality -- and life in general -- seems "over-explained" in Jung's
theory.

I have found that his theory sometimes attracts students who have difficulty
dealing with reality. When the world, especially the social world, becomes
too difficult, some people retreat into fantasy. Some, for example, become
couch potatoes. But others turn to complex ideologies that pretend to explain
everything. Some get involved in Gnostic or Tantric religions, the kind
that present intricate rosters of angels and demons and heavens and hells,
and endlessly discuss symbols. Some go to Jung. There is nothing intrinsically
wrong with this; but for someone who is out of touch with reality, this
is hardly going to help.

These criticisms do not cut the foundation out from under Jung's theory.
But they do suggest that some careful consideration is in order.

The positive things

On the plus side, there is the Myers-Briggs and other tests based on
Jung's types and functions. Because they do not place people on dimensions
that run from "good" to "bad," they are much less threatening. They encourage
people to become more aware of themselves.

The archetypes, at first glance, might seem to be Jung's strangest idea.
And yet they have proven to be very useful in the analysis of myths, fairy
tales, literature in general, artistic symbolism, and religious exposition.
They apparently capture some of the basic "units" of our self-expression.
Many people have suggested that there are only so many stories and characters
in the world, and we just keep on rearranging the details.

This suggests that the archetypes actually do refer to some deep structures
of the human mind. After all, from the physiological perspective, we come
into his world with a certain structure: We see in a certain way, hear
in a certain way, "process information" in a certain way, behave in a certain
way, because our neurons and glands and muscles are structured in a certain
way. At least one cognitive psychologist has suggested looking for the
structures that correspond to Jung's archetypes!

Finally, Jung has opened our eyes to the differences between child development
and adult development. Children clearly emphasize differentiation -- separating
one thing from another -- in their learning. "What's this?" " Why is it
this way and not that?" "What kinds are there?" They actively seek diversity.
And many people, psychologists included, have been so impressed by this
that they have assumed that all learning is a matter of differentiation,
of learning more and more "things."

But Jung has pointed out that adults search more for integration, for
the transcending of opposites. Adults search for the connections between
things, how things fit together, how they interact, how they contribute
to the whole. We want to make sense of it, find the meaning of it, the
purpose of it all. Children unravel the world; adults try to knit it back
together.

Connections

On the one hand, Jung is still attached to his Freudian roots. He emphasizes
the unconscious even more than Freudians do. In fact, he might be seen
as the logical extension of Freud's tendency to put the causes of things
into the past. Freud, too, talked about myths --Oedipus, for example --
and how they impact on the modern psyche.

On the other hand, Jung has a lot in common with the neo-Freudians,
humanists, and existentialists. He believes that we are meant to progress,
to move in a positive direction, and not just to adapt, as the Freudians
and behaviorists would have it. His idea of self-realization is clearly
similar to self-actualization.

The balancing or transcending of opposites also has counterparts in
other theories. Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Andreas Angyal, David Bakan, Gardner
Murphy, and Rollo May all make reference to balancing two opposing tendencies,
one towards individual development and the other towards the development
of compassion or social interest. Rollo May talks about the psyche being
composed of many "daimons" (little gods) such as the desire for sex, or
love, or power. All are positive in their place, but should any one take
over the whole personality, we would have "daimonic possession," or mental
illness!

Finally, we owe to Jung the broadening of interpretation, whether of
symptoms or dreams or free-associations. While Freud developed more-or-less
rigid (specifically, sexual) interpretations, Jung allowed for a rather
free-wheeling "mythological" interpretation, wherein anything could mean,
well, anything. Existential analysis, in particular, has benefited from
Jung's ideas.